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Sentiment as a IFlational Hsset 



AN ORATION 



DELIVERED AT THE 



FOURTH OF JULY CELEBRATION 



IN 



TENAFLY, NEW JERSEY 
JULY 4, 1908 



BY 



BARR FERREE 



[New York : No. 7 Warren Street] 






Gift 

Author 
(Perion> 

11 JUL 1901? 



SENTIMENT AS A NATIONAL ASSET 



An Oration Delivered at the Fourth of July 
Celebration at Tenafly, New Jersey, on 
July Fourth, 1908. 

My Fellow Citizens and Neighbors : — 

We may congratulate ourselves that out of the three hun- 
dred and sixty-five or three hundred and sixty-six days of the 
year we are able to devote one to the glorification of our 
country. The Fourth of July still remains a day of universal 
national significance. It is the day of days for telling each 
other how great we are; what we have done; what we hope 
to do. 

National greatness cannot be achieved by mere reiteration 
of statements. To say that a thing is so, does not bring 
it into existence. Mere talk, which is purely talk, accom- 
plishes so little it might better be left unsaid. There must 
be action behind every undertaking; there must be work 
before there can be results; and there must, above all, be 
merit in every single thing that looks to accomplishment, 
whether it be personal or private, individual or national. 
This is the universal law to which there is no exception 
and from which there is no escape. Transitory or momen- 
tary success is no success at all, and has no more real effect 
than the gust of wind that blows your hat off, and is gone 
before vou have had time to realize it has arrived. 



And so, while the orators who are hurhng forth their 
eloquence to-day may, for the moment, satisfy you that you 
live in a great and glorious country, their flood of words 
will produce no effect at all unless their hearers know, feel 
and realize the stupendous volume of solid fact, of con- 
crete reality, of absolute proof, that must be behind every 
truthful word. And more: for there must also be aroused 
in the heart of every one whose ears are ravished by these 
glowing utterances, a personal sense of personal responsi- 
bility in all this greatness. This is the great fact. The 
great lesson of to-day is not the imperishable greatness 
of our land, but the indisputable, unavoidable and essential 
part each of us as citizens must contribute to this greatness. 
And believe me, unless we do make this personal contribu- 
tion, orators and talkers to the contrary and notwithstand- 
ing, there will be no solid reality on which a single good 
word can be said. 

We hear much of our national greatness ; it would be 
better if we did more and listened less. What individual 
contribution has any of us made — you and I, good friends 
and neighbors — in the last ten years, or five years, or one 
year, to our national greatness? I mean a real contribution, 
something that will truly help this Nation in a helpful 
way, and which will live after us when we are dead and 
gone. In the last seven years our Chief Magistrate has 
left unsaid no word that could be said on this grand theme. 
No one has ever talked so much about the greatness of our 
country as Theodore Roosevelt ; and could talk alone have 
convinced the world of our national supremacy, his talk, 
and the glamor of his mighty office would have been all 
convincing and all satisfying. But the presidential great- 

4 



ness is a belligerent greatness ; a greatness of the fist and 
the gun, of the cannon and the battleship. 

Real greatness is a lasting greatness; a greatness for 
your time and mine; a greatness that endures; a greatness 
that future ages will look back to with pride as something 
inconceivably fine and grand. x\nd the world's history 
shows that this greatness is not achieved by talk and fight- 
ing, but by doing and by peace; by action and by work; 
by the mind, which in the end triumphs, and eternally 
triumphs, over the body. 

The great fact in American greatness is that it is a ma- 
terial greatness. It is a greatness of dollars and cents, of 
wealth and science. It is not a greatness we have bought, 
but a greatness we have achieved by the accumulation of 
money. We are prosperous because we have an abundance 
of money, plenty of people and plenty of work. All this 
makes for material success, and hence for material great- 
ness. We measure our greatness in tons of pig iron, in 
bushels of wheat, in tonnage of vessels, in miles of railroad, 
in the billions of our financial and commercial exchanges. 
The figures that measure our financial and man- 
ufacturing transactions are staggering in their immensity 
and utterly incomprehensible as to their totals. There is 
no duller reading than the Statistical Abstracts published 
by the national government, but there is no truer barometer 
to the achievements of our national greatness than those 
endless pages of figures. 

Great? Of course we are great, and stupendously so. But 
I must insist that this greatness is the material greatness of 
the dollar. It is not the greatness of the mind and intellect ; 
and in all the world mind is the only thing that counts and 

5 



endures. It is the immaterial that is really great and 
really lasting. The material is with us to-day; the im- 
material will carry our name down through the ages so long 
as record remains of contemporary civilization. 

No people ever achieved such immortal greatness as the 
ancient Greeks. The monuments of their commercial 
supremacy among the people of their own time have utterly 
passed away; and only the monuments of their intellect re- 
main : their wonderful architecture ; their supreme sculp- 
tures; their intensely intellectual philosophy; their redound- 
ing oratory. The mind of Greece still leads the culture of 
the world, leads it powerfully and supremely. Its nations 
have passed away, but the wonderful fruit of the Greek 
mind still ripen for us to grasp and make our own if we 
but will. 

This is true greatness ; and is a kind that is not measured 
by your ability to knock your neighbor down with your 
fist, to buy his little property or to ruin him in business 
for your own advantage. It is a greatness that has 
stood the test of all time, and which looms the larger as the 
centuries move slowly on. It is a greatness of which we 
Americans have hardly anything at all, but which we need, 
and need badly. 

There are many ways in which this higher, nobler great- 
ness can be helped and furthered. I have only time to speak 
of one, and of that but briefly. I want to ask your attention 
to the value of sentiment as a national asset. Most of us 
know what sentiment is. Very many, no doubt, think it is a 
state of mind that is especially observable in very young 
men and women. A very fine thing that sentiment is; a 
joyous sort of sentiment, that is charmingly calculated to 

6 



give delight to the persons most concerned. This is a per- 
sonal sentiment, and we may be sure it is quite as well de- 
veloped in foreign lands as with us. 

National sentiment is something quite different. It is 
love of country; it is interest in our past; it is faith in our 
future; it is personal feeling for our land and everything 
concerned with it. It is something without form or body; 
a quality ; a state of mind, if you will ; something you can- 
not see, or touch, or feel ; but something that acts and re- 
acts on the heart and mind. A brilliant speaker once de- 
fined art as something that stirred the imagination ; and 
immediately added that the more the imagination is stirred, 
the greater is the work of art. Something of the same 
kind of a definition may be applied to national sentiment. 
Yet it is beyond explanation, beyond concrete expression, 
beyond mere verbal phrasing. It is a true heart sense that 
we may feel, but cannot visualize outside ourselves. 

We must go back to the very fundamentals of our begin- 
ings as a Nation if we would realize, as we should, the 
value of sentiment in our own present-day life and work. 

(For whatever we are to-day, and whatever we may hope 
to be in the future, is due to the greatness of our past, and 
to the good men and the noble deeds of times that came 
before our own. 

" Our country is rich in memories and memorials that 
give rise to national sentiment, and which individualize 
and crystalize the most precious facts of our nationality. 
Who can stand unmoved within the walls of Faneuil Hall, 
that cradle of American Liberty in Boston, which has been 
the scene of so many notable episodes in our early national 
life? Who will not bare his head in awed remembrance in 

7 



the paneled room in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in 
which the immortal Declaration was adopted? Who will 
stand stolidly besides the grave of Washington at Mount 
Vernon; or look slightingly upon the hoary earthworks 
of Valley Forge; or upon the monumented battlefield of 
Gettysburg; or on the scene of that final treaty at Appo- 
mattox? Truly are these great national shrines of world- 
wide interest and renown, landmarks in national history 
and in world history, before which every human being who 
knows but the barest outlines of their story must stand 
awed and abased. All America contains nothing more 
precious, and nowhere else does national sentiment rise to 
loftier heights. 

Fortunate and thrice blessed are the communities that 
contain such sacred memorials within their midst! Yet they 
belong to each of us, as intimately, as personally, as 
truly, as to those who live beneath their shadows. America 
knows no localism in its national shrines; and the build- 
ings and lands where the great scenes of our splendid 
national drama have been enacted, are the chief treasures 
of our citizens everywhere. 

They should be. That is the real point. They should 
be. As a matter of fact they cannot be unless we in- 
dividually awake to their personal value to us. And this 
value is a sentimental value; it is beyond expression in 
dollars; it has nothing to do with bushels and tons; it is 
quite outside the influence of bank exchanges. It is a 
value of the heart and mind, hence, incapable of measure- 
ment, the most prized of all our national possessions. 

Nor is the interest of the sentimental patriot limited to 
the world-conr-elling interest of our most important na- 

8 



tional shrines. We must not ignore any single fact in our 
country or in our history. We must be interested in, 
even if we cannot love, every physical, visible fact by 
which we are surrounded. We cannot be at home unless 
we are satisfied with the place in which we live. Our 
patriotic interest, in short, must not be concentrated upon 
distant and remote buildings in Boston and Philadelphia; 
or upon far-away battlefields that we perhaps know better 
by name than by sight; but must begin with our own 
homes and houses, take in our own hills and valleys, include 
our own woods and rivulets. National sentiment may not 
begin with the home, but it must include it; and with the 
home it must include all that surrounds it and helps to 
make it. 

Did it ever occur to you that you were rendering a dis- 
tinct service to this Nation by being satisfied with the 
place in which you live? I believe this to be true, and 
profoundly true. There is no nobler sentiment than to be 
completely satisfied with the place in which one lives. 
Local pride and local interest are the foundations on which 
national pride and national faith and hope are imperishably 
upheld and enthroned. It is well to begin at the beginning; 
and as the home and family are primary facts from which 
the Nation is evolved, so interest in one's own home and 
house are the primary factors which in their ultimate stage 
constitute national sentiment. 

I am aware that it is sometimes difficult to take the in- 
terest in one's immediate surroundings that one ought to 
take. It is sometimes hard to be completely satisfied with 
the community in which one finds oneself, or to which one 
voluntarily attaches oneself. But never buy a house and 

9 



then proceed to hate it ; never enter a community and then 
proceed to revile it; never encourage dislike and feed your- 
self with the notion that because everything is not just as 
you want it, therefore all must be bad. 

There is a patriotic value in personal attachment to one's 
own house and soil that does not appear always to be com- 
pletely appreciated in this remarkable country of ours. 
How can it be, when the continuous occupancy of a house 
by the descendants of the original inhabitants for a hundred 
or two hundred years is cited as an historical curiosity of 
the first rank? How can it be, when the gentlemen who 
are industriously engaged in the promotion of the sale of 
real estate ofifer, as an inducement to immediate purchase, 
the interesting prophecy that prices are rising and that in 
a few years you can sell out at a handsome profit and move 
elsewhere? How can it be, when the tax assessor is load- 
ing assessments onto your property, so that its value rises 
in leaps and bounds, and in a very short time you may find 
it cheaper to sell than to pay taxes? 

All these things are wrong, and grievously wrong; and 
while we may think they are matters of no especial in- 
terest, perhaps of no especial value, this is only because 
this indifference is a developed indifference; a state of mind 
and feeling we have fallen into, without a realization of 
the tendency it actually has, or of the end it must finally 
reach. It is one of the too numerous themes on which, as a 
nation, we are drifting, drifting, heedless of the end, and 
regardless of the present. 

The first of all requirements of good citizenship is satis- 
faction with our country. We cannot be faithful Americans 
unless we are faithful to America. We cannot be faithful 

10 



to America unless we are faithful to our own immediate 
surroundings; faithful to our own state and county, faith- 
ful to our own borough and home. This faithfulness in its 
highest form — the only one that really counts — must be 
impersonal and general, and be forever everlasting. It 
should not be dependent on the placing of an electric 
light fixture at some convenient point ; or on the laying of 
a sidewalk which our immediate superiors in government 
permit us to put down at our own expense. It should 
not end with the completion of some supposed public im- 
provement in which we may be personally interested ; but 
it should be definite and lasting, and continuous with 
one's sojourn in the spot one has selected as a place of 
residence. 

If this interest does not come naturally, it must be de- 
veloped and nourished. It must be encouraged and pro- 
moted. It must be helped and furthered. We need to 
know and to realize, in the most thorough way possible, that 
each of us is a fellow citizen of a common country; that 
each of us is but a part of a colossal aggregation whose 
stupendous growth has been without rival in history, and 
whose vastness and material achievements constitute one of 
the marvels of all time. 

A sacred and natural pride is caused by association with 
so glorious an entity; and there is no better way of de- 
veloping this pride than by personal interest in one's im- 
mediate surroundings. This is really much more important 
than in creating an interest in a distant battlefield or in 
some remotely situated structure. The land around us 
is within easy reach and is our own. For ourselves, here 
in Northern New Jersey, it abounds in spots of natural 

11 



beauty and picturesque interest. One should live here be- 
cause one wants to live here, and not because one simply 
happens to own real estate in this vicinity. 

The relations between local pride and national pride are 
everywhere close and certain; they are ever overlaping, 
and are intertwined with the most intimate association 
and development. One may think one may have one with- 
out the other; one may delude oneself with the notion that 
one is a true American and faithful because one cherishes 
the Declaration of Independence, while feeding his heart 
with the most dreadful dislike of his own place of residence 
and all that is concerned with it. I know the local govern- 
ment is not always kindly nor even wise ; that it is often 
conducted in a narrow and selfish way, and means heavy 
costs to property owners in the guise of so-called "improve- 
ments." There are other things, too, that do not always 
seem to be as satisfactory as they might or should. But I 
cannot believe these causes of dissatisfaction and of fric- 
tion to be permanent, nor these annoyances to be lasting 
nor always unavoidable. 

If they are, wherein is the value of our boasted citizen- 
ship? For what dT3 our fathers bleed and suffer? For 
what does our flag throw the mantle of its thrice col- 
ored material above our heads? For what this day 
and all it means? If there be ought in the present 
time that is not as it should be, look back into our 
past, study what our Nation was in its beginning, find out 
for what our forefathers labored, and seek in the sentiment 
of the past a cure for the ills and failings of the present! 

Sentiment? We need it every day and every hour. We 
need it in our business; we need it in our homes; we need 

12 



it in our local government ; we need it in our national life. 
We need to value the immaterial aspect of things more, 
and the material less. We need more of beauty and less 
of utility. We need more of the ideal and less of the real. 
We need to value more the thoughtful man and less he 
who has simply accumulated bags of money. This is a very 
materialistic age, in which success is too often gauged by the 
size of one's bank account. Yet the world's immortals include 
few names of the very rich, and none at all of the persons 
whose wealth constituted their single claim to recognition. 
But a few of us can hope for immortality in this world ; 
yet I submit it as an indisputable and universal measure 
of success. It is the sentimentalist and the idealist who 
win out in the long run. Mind is the only thing that 
counts in the world; and the most intellectual and there- 
fore the most successful people are those who give place 
to their poets and their artists, to their thinkers and their 
teachers, to their students and their philosophers. A man's 
success cannot rightly be numbered by the money he wins; 
but by what he does and what he is. "For what is a man 
profited, if he shall gain the world, and lose his own soul?" 
The sentimentalist has no peer, and his value to the nation at 
large is a national asset of supreme importance. 



13 



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